Oakland Raiders quarterback Derek Carr was masterful in leading his team to a 41-31 victory over the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks in their last game of the preseason. Unknown is whether Carr will be selected as the starting QB when the Raiders face the New York Jets in the Meadowlands on Sunday.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner carried a perfect game into the eighth inning before surrendering a hit to Justin Morneau of the Colorado Rockies, highlighting a 3-0 win. The Giants ace shows no signs of slowing down. To view an album, to be posted shortly, visit our Facebook page and be sure to LIKE us.

Oakland A's outfielder Coco Crisp receives congratulations after scoring what proved to be the deciding run in a 2-1 victory over the Los Angeles Angels on Aug. 23. Following an eighth inning single, Coco advanced to third on back-to-back groundouts and scored on a wild pitch. Photo by Michael Zagaris.

Stanford Cardinal senior wide receiver Ty Montgomery fields a punt by the UC Davis Aggies and returns it 60 yards for a touchdown at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto on Saturday, Aug. 30. The Cardinal posted a 45-0 rout of the Aggies in Stanford's first game of the 2014 season. To view an album of the game, to be posted shortly, visit our Facebook page and be sure to LIKE us.

The San Francisco Fire, the first National Pro Grid Team in San Francisco, defeated the Philadelphia Founders at Haas Pavilion in Berkeley on Aug. 28. Grid, newly formed, is the world's first professional spectator sport with co-ed teams competing in strategic athletics racing. To view an album of the competition, click HERE or visit our Facebook page and be sure to LIKE us. For more information, visit www.npgl.com. Photo by Ron Sellers.

In the spring of 1983 a torrent of abruptly melting record snow pack in the Colorado Rockies overwhelmed Lake Powell's capacity to receive the runoff. The rising lake waters threatened to overflow the 710-foot-high Glenn Canyon Dam. Using plywood panels, workers hurriedly elevated the 5 million-cubic-yard concrete structure by 10 additional feet to thwart the fast-rising Colorado River waters, which peaked with just inches to spare.

Glenn Canyon Dam operators were releasing as much water as they dared through the dam's turbines, bypass tubes and the spillways that had already been damaged by the runoff, resulting in a far greater flow downstream through Grand Canyon than any of us longtime river guides had experienced during many years of transporting tourists in 17-foot dories through big whitewater.

Three of us professional boatmen saw this as an opportunity to fulfill our long-standing fantasy of rowing a hard-hulled wooden boat through Grand Canyon's 273 river miles in the shortest possible time, attempting to break a record set three decades earlier, before Glenn Canyon Dam regulated the downstream flow.

To shorten a long story, we accomplished our goal. We rowed day and night, completing the 273-mile stretch (for which our commercial river trips take two and a half weeks) in 37 hours, 36 minutes and 29 seconds.

The longer story of how these twin dramas unfolded in parallel -- the dam's engineers struggling to save the mammoth structure and three river guides attempting a record run, each party oblivious of the challenges faced by the other -- is fascinatingly told by Kevin Fedarko in his award-winning book, The Emerald Mile (Simon & Schuster), a page-turner if there ever was one. Go get yourself a copy to read the entire riveting story. (Full disclosure: While a principal in the book, I do not receive a commission from book sales.)

Editor's note: Further full disclosure -- Rudi Petschek is the talented brother-in-law of the Ultimate Sports Guide's publisher, Christopher Weills.

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